Why Family Christian Stores is bankrupt for good: Pledged in 2012 to give 100% of profits to charity

That's no way to run a business, but it is a way to bankrupt it.

It took less than five years. And now over 3,000 employees who had jobs don't.

Good job, idiots!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Family Christian's own story here on November 29, 2012:

Family Christian, the nation's largest Christian retail chain with 280 stores in 36 states, announced today that its management team has partnered with a group of Atlanta-based Christian businessmen to acquire the company from its private equity owners. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Under the new ownership, Family Christian's pledge is to contribute 100% of its profits to Christian causes and, specifically, ministries serving widows and orphans both in the U.S. and abroad. Family Christian has always been committed to providing resources for the Christian community, but the new ownership structure will allow the organization to not only equip Christians in their daily walk, but to increase the organization's impact by providing substantial financial support to faith-based causes.

Fast forward to now. Dateline Grand Rapids, Michigan, February 23, 2017 here:

GRAND RAPIDS, MI - Family Christian Stores, the nation's largest chain of Christian book and merchandise stores, announced it will close its doors after 85 years in business.

The announcement on Thursday, Feb. 23, did not specify a timetable for the liquidation, which will affect more than 3,000 employees at more than 240 stores in 36 states.

In 2015, Family Christian shed about $127 million worth of debt to its suppliers, creditors and consignment vendors when it went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was sold for about $55 million.

"We had two very difficult years post-bankruptcy," said company president Chuck Bengochea in a news release, that blamed changing consumer habits and declining sales for the decision.

Giving profits away to charity is simply destruction of capital, which was needed to plow back into the company to keep it profitable under the very difficult retail circumstances of the online age after a terrible recession.

Too bad the ownership didn't think of its obligation to its employees and customers first. That they didn't indicates the ownership deserved this, but the lives now wrecked because of their blindness most certainly did not deserve it.

In the Marburg Colloquy the Lutherans and the Reformed forever parted company over the meaning of the presence of Christ

Present everywhere, huh?

You can read a transcript of the Marburg Colloquy of 1529 online here.

About it Gene Veith here points to "the different approaches not just to the Sacrament but to the Bible and, above all, to Christology."

This is most certainly true, but it is the different approach to the Bible I think which is paramount, for it is from the Bible that Luther derives his Christology and all his doctrine. Its articles of faith dominate independently and are not to be put at war with one another:

"Every article of faith is a principle in itself and does not require proof from another one."

Luther defends his understanding of the Holy Supper on the basis of the plain meaning of the words of institution from the Synoptic testimony, whereas the rationalistic reformers venture far and wide over the ancient fathers and the text of Scripture in their debate with Luther, but end up appealing especially to John's Gospel to argue against Luther's understanding of that Synoptic testimony.

For example, Oecolampadius of Basel opened the meeting with a salvo which takes Christ's presence at the right hand of God in heaven so narrowly and literally that for him Christ couldn't possibly be present bodily also in the Holy Supper at the same time. But for Luther, "this is my body" means both things can be true at the same time because Scripture says so, even though we cannot understand it.

In this Luther refused to make Scripture the enemy of Scripture (of course, his problems with James for example show that if he thought there were differences which couldn't be reconciled, well, then the offending Scripture must not be Scripture). 

If anyone ever doubted Luther's devotion to the authority of the text of Scripture to the exclusion of all else, one need only meditate on this excerpt from near the conclusion of the meeting:

"The important thing, as Augustine says, is that the words of the fathers must be understood in relation to Scripture. If they seem to run counter to the Scriptures, one must clarify them by interpretation, or reject them." 

Martin Luther, sovereign theologian, sovereign individual.

Big thinker Michael Novak, 83, has passed away after a battle with cancer

Michael Novak was an important Roman Catholic advocate for not just the compatibility of free market capitalism with Christianity, but for the idea that free market capitalism actually advanced the aims of Christianity, particularly the alleviation of poverty.

This made Novak an odd duck more among Catholics than among Protestants because Catholics had more generally posed as prophets like Jesus, ridiculing wealth, hoping they could inspire voluntary redistribution of it, whereas Protestants thought human beings should prove God's blessing by becoming, if not wealthy, at least self-sustaining members of society. Their shared error from the point of view of Jesus, however, is their mutual belief in human action.

I remember hearing Novak speak at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the days surrounding the release of his 1982 book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, his most influential work. Already then it seemed to me he misunderstood the aims of Jesus, if not the aims of Jesus' heirs. As recently as 2014 he misunderstood them still, not appreciating that the Carpenter's Son turned his back on small business capitalism by giving up his job, which was in keeping with his requirement that his followers do the same, in the belief that God was about to intervene decisively in Jewish history. Jewish history, not world history.

Like many contemporary self-styled conservatives, Novak had formerly been a leftist. I maintain that his interpretation of Jesus shows that he remained a leftist, the essence of which is to introduce utopia through human action. The phenomenon is not uniquely left, however, but human, a form of rebellion. Christians, like the Pharisees before them, made the same mistake, believing that they could extend the kingdom of God among men by acting as God's agents through the democratization of holiness through the universal availability of his Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ.

Both misunderstood the liminal setting for the ideas of Jesus, who above all else eschewed human action, whether by the Tea Party of his time, the Zealots, or by the liberals of his time, the Pharisees, who sought to extend the particular holiness of the Temple's priestly class to all the people through the synagogue system. Through the genius of the Pharisee Saul of Tarsus, Christianity ended up making Pharisaism safe for the whole world, minus the food restrictions and the mutilation.

As the eschatological prophet of promise, however, Jesus did not believe that the eternal verities would or could come by such human action, but only by divine action, divine intervention. This implied judgment, the two sides of which were impending salvation and imminent doom. Jesus was fundamentally a pessimistic thinker from the human point of view who did not believe that most of his contemporaries would be "saved" in this advent of judgment.

There was only one way to escape, and that involved radical repentance, of which few were capable.

No man, he said, can be my disciple who does not say goodbye to everything that he owns.

In the final analysis, every individual says goodbye to everything that he owns, as Michael Novak has just done. The tragedy of human life is that most of us simply spend our lives imagining that we won't have to.

"Likewise as it was in the days of Lot--they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built . . .."

In "A Mighty Fortress is our God" Luther plainly hymned the divisive cost of discipleship

And take they our life,

Goods, fame, child and wife,

Let these all be gone,

They yet have nothing won;

The Kingdom ours remaineth.

-- Martin Luther, 1529

Who will give a stone to a son who asks for bread?

Allah, apparently.

Peter Leithart wrings his hands over the divisions caused by the Reformation, uttering complete rubbish

Here in First Things:

The catastrophic effects of these divisions rippled out into European culture, society, and politics. They’re rippling still. Worse, the fragmentation of the Church undermined the evangelical aims of the Reformers. By its sibling feuds, the Reformation quenched the very Spirit it had unleashed.

Protestants were not solely responsible for the division of the Church. Catholic intransigence and treachery silenced prophetic voices and delayed and prevented the deep self-examination the Church needed. Yet Protestants were responsible, especially for the divisions within the Reformation’s own ranks.

Quenched the Spirit, eh? Which spirit? Peter Leithart, like most Christians of the contemporary period, doesn't grasp the essentially divisive nature of the coming of the Spirit, as if the prophets were put to death for preaching the unity of the faith in the bond of peace. The prophets critiqued the household of God, calling it to repentance and revealing its sins, often at the cost of their lives.

It is a fetish of our utopian age to exclude this point of view in favor of a preoccupation with unity. But it's still disturbing that churchmen seem caught up in it, even at this late hour in the ridiculous history of ecumenism. They'll do anything it seems not to face the fact that in the Bible the idea is a development of its later literature, emphasized in the Fourth Gospel (especially John 10 and 17) and the Pauline Ephesian letter (chapter 4), neither of which can be reconciled with the Synoptic tradition nor the early genuine letters of Paul without doing a little violence to reason. Even the Passion narratives have been reworked from this point of view of the later "church", which is the first concrete expression of Christianity's decadence. Robust preoccupation with "the Other" from the original period of the Spirit gave way to the crabbed self-reflection and identity "politics" of Christian, Jew, church, synagogue, Greek, barbarian, male, female, slave, free, and Roman citizen.  

Jesus the eschatological prophet, on the other hand, never imagined a "church", let alone this long, drawn out history betwixt heaven and hell. He did not imagine "identities". Those who do the will of God are my mother, sisters and brothers, he said. Many are called. Few are chosen. Narrow is the gate and difficult the way that leads to life. Few are they who find it. Repent while you still can. The reign of God is nigh. Come follow me.

What a polarizing fellow.

"All his ways are judgment" (Deut. 32:4).

 

Protestants shouldn't apologize for it.

Obscure blogger reveals how he shrugs off Pope Francis

I'm not on tranquilizers either.

Authenticity, as the Devil's Dictionary might have it

Authenticity

n. 100% pure synthetic, formerly never used of persons for reasons no longer obvious, a vestige of  dead Romanticism cut from its corpse and cherished and venerated like a talisman in the pursuit of episodes of emotional excess.

Not coincidentally it is a disease particularly afflicting the young, who have little experience of being reliable, dependable and trustworthy but account for half of the 20 million new diagnoses of sexually transmitted disease every year. And more generally the world's fish population.

Supremes decline to hear case, polygamy remains a crime in Utah

Here is the lede:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear arguments from the husband and four wives who star in the television show "Sister Wives," letting stand a lower court ruling that kept polygamy a crime in Utah. 

The story indicates the Supremes let stand a Denver appeals court ruling that "The Browns" had no standing to sue in the first place under the Utah statute.

Viewership of their Sister Wives show struggles around the 2 million mark.

Duck Dynasty by contrast, a show about a large successful colorful but traditional family, averaged 8.7 million viewers in 2013. 

The poor refugees

Poor refugees, at first they purchase here;

And soon as denizen'd, they domineer.

-- John Dryden